Not only does the arrival of a new David Fincher film bring enough delight in itself, it also means we get insight into the director’s process. We recently featured an extensive conversation with the director and cast on Charlie Rose, and now we have the helmer talking solo with Kurt Andersen at Studio 360. The 50-minute conversation touches on why he made Gone Girl, his real-life experience living during the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, working on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and more, but one of the most interesting aspects is how he got interested in filmmaking.

“I was about seven years old and I was watching network television, because that’s all there was, and there was a documentary on the making of George Roy Hill‘s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Fincher says. “I had not seen the movie, but my parents had told me it was a great movie and I was allowed to go see it. I just saw this making of and it was the first time it ever occurred to me that movies weren’t made in real-time, that if you watched a movie that took two hours it was probably made in a couple afternoons. If it was complicated, it could take a week. It never occurred to me that it took months and months and months. So I watched this and thought, you get to blow up full-size balsa wood trains, you get to have cowboys on horseback and you get to hang out with Katharine Ross. This sounds like a pretty good job.”